KODAK SCANMATE i920 Scanner Review – Little scanner with powerful punch

The Scan Man believes this scanner will be a big winner for Kodak.  The Kodak i920 is a compact desktop scanner that preserves your precious desk space with a small footprint.  It will make you more efficient as you are able to automate repetitive tasks.  The scanner also includes Presto Bizcard software to scan your business cards into a database or your contact management system.

With Kodak’s Smart Touch functionality, the KODAK SCANMATE i920 gets important business documents into your information network in an instant. That’s because Smart Touch automates multiple-step scanning operations by capturing, processing, and sending information for you. At the touch of a button, Smart Touch helps you make e-mail attachments, picture files, searchable PDFs, and more. Plus it files documents or sends them to “the cloud.” For example, if a business configured its ID card scanning process as Option 2, an employee could simply select “2” on the scanner display. The ID card would be scanned, processed, and sent to its proper destination — automatically.

Eight great things you can do with the KODAK SCANMATE i920 Scanner to get ahead

• Save space – compact, highly portable design takes up less desk space.
• Save time – SmartTouch performs multiple-step scanning and organizing operations automatically
• Make great images- Kodak ‘Perfect Page document imaging is built in – just presss the button and get great images with bright colors and crisp text.
• Scan it all – reliably handles a wide range of document with the 20 sheet automatic document feeder, including extra-long documents, business cards, ID cards, and embossed hard cards.
• Stay in contact – Bundled software helps you easily edit and synchronize business card info with your contact applications.
• Integrate easily – TWAIN and ISIS drivers allow quick compatibility with most scanning software.
• Get peace of mind. – Kodak’s three year limited warranty supports Kodak’s commitment to superior workmanship.
• Upgrade your Capture Desktop to Kodak Capture Pro edition for even more scanning application features like indexing, bar code recognition, and database verification.

Gartner Says Now More Than Ever Is the Time to Re-Imagine the Role of IT

The Scan Man would like to leave 2011 with this article from Document Management News.  It describes the views of Gartner Group analysts  on the role of modernizing technologies.  Read on:

Modernizing technologies are not enough for CIOs to succeed; it is time for IT leaders to re-imagine IT, according to Gartner, Inc.

This is the era of mass collaboration driven by the consumerization of IT. For an IT leader to thrive in this environment, they must re-imagine their role, and they must lead from the front.

During the opening keynote today at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 20, Gartner analysts told an audience of 8,500 CIOs and IT leaders there are three initiatives to implement to re-imagine IT: post-modern business, simplicity, and creative destruction.

“IT leaders must embrace the post-modern business, a business driven by customer relationships where the customer is everywhere, and so must your business; a world fuelled by the explosion in information, collaboration, and mobility, enabled by the cloud,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research. “You must pursue simplicity by putting people and their needs at the center of design. You must dare to employ creative destruction to eliminate legacy, and selectively destroy low impact systems.”

Post-Modern Business

“A post-modern business is one that completely rethinks the status quo of business and embraces dramatically new relationships with its customers, suppliers, and partners,” said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner fellow. “In the post-modern business, your business has no walls. It must be everywhere. It will be a virtual and fluid business that changes as customers change. In the post-modern business, you will forget phrases such as ‘business architecture’ and embrace phrases like customer delight, customer involvement, and customer intimacy. In the post-modern business, customer and constituent demands on you will change faster than your architectures.”

IT leaders have to delight customers who are more informed about their products in changing markets than ever before. Customers want to know the business cares about their immediate concerns, so CIOs have to capture the interest of customers whose attentions span is shorter, through customer intimacy.

“In a world where the average company only lasts 10 years, every added point of customer satisfaction alone could add one year to the life of your business,” Mr. Plummer said. “Post-modern businesses don’t spend all their money just on customer loyalty programs. They invest in company loyalty to the customers.”

Businesses are becoming post-modern by leveraging the trends of the age. One of these trends is cloud computing. Gartner analysts said that most people don’t realize that cloud computing is about more than just cost savings. Cloud computing is also about specialization. Cloud service providers are specialists who focus all their attention on doing one thing such as email, HR, or managing servers. These specialists support consumers who pick the services they want to use from the providers they want to work with. Trading solutions across a large chain of cloud services adds complexity that must be tamed. This will result in the emergence of cloud brokerages.

“Cloud brokerages can aggregate, integrate, govern, or customize cloud services to make those services more specific to the needs of the consumers,” Mr. Plummer said. “They will re-imagine business, and post-modern businesses will even re-imagine the roles that IT departments will play. Three out of 10 IT organizations will become cloud brokers for their business, and that is one way they will survive.”

Simplicity

“We live in such a complex, time-crunched world,” said Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner. “The result is that we all crave simplicity, and so in re-imagining IT, IT leaders have the opportunity – no, the responsibility – to deliver simplicity to their customers and employees.”

Gartner analysts said evidence of this demand to simplicity has been the shift from PCs to mobile. People are gravitating to the simplicity of the mobile and tablet experiences, and developers are following.

“By 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber PC projects by 4 to 1. The PC is no longer king,” Mr. LeHong said. “IT needs to be part of building out this future. Things should be so simple that people should be able to do what they need to do on any device.”

With the shift to the mobile world, Gartner analysts said context-aware computing is crucial. It helps IT leaders understand intent, so that they can create simpler, yet richer experiences.

“Context-aware computing is the intersection between our separate lives in the digital, mobile, social and physical world,” Mr. LeHong said. “Context-aware applications take context about me in the physical world – such as my location, time of day – and my usage patterns in the digital world, and deliver it to the me in the mobile world.”

“Simplicity done right does not eliminate complexity, it makes it invisible,” Mr. LeHong said. “You’re not trying to ‘dumb down’ an experience; you’re trying to enrich it.”

This means IT leaders will need people on their teams who know how to get context, such as from a location from a smartphone, or understand intent based on past behavior, or infer it from social network activity, in a way that is natural, invisible and enriching to employees and customers.

Creative Destruction

“Most IT organizations have 70 percent or more of their time, money and mindshare locked into reliability, keeping things going,” said Tina Nunno, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Yet demands for game changing IT capabilities are growing every year. IT leaders must transform their businesses, products, services, and value proposition to the external customer, and challenge traditional ways of thinking.”

Many IT departments are thought of as excellent service providers to their business. While being a great service provider is difficult to do, service and leadership cannot always live in the same space. IT leaders should stop taking demands and requirements and start making recommendations. They need to turn those requests into strategic discussions.

Gartner recommends IT leaders implement the concept it calls the “Pace Layered Application Strategy.”

“Pace layering is a technique to help IT leaders make decisions about what assets in their portfolio are candidates for creative destruction. The model borrows from the way architects design buildings – separating what has to change frequently – from what is foundational and longer-term in nature,” Ms. Nunno said. “You have Systems of Record, Systems of Differentiation, and Systems of Innovation, each with their own natural lifecycles and place in the business ecosystem.”

Gartner analysts said IT leaders must destroy perfectionism and embrace calculated risk. CIOs tend to be perfectionists who are highly detail-oriented. It’s what has made so many of them good at their jobs. However, it can sometimes lead to issues with risk and uncertainty.

“Never taking risks means you are predictable and an easy target for your competition,” Ms. Nunno said. “Strive to take calculated risks and surprise both your business and the competition.”

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world’s leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers. Gartner’s annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees’ annual planning efforts. IT executives rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency.

More exclusive content, expanding multi-media coverage, including Twitter feeds and comments from the Gartner Blog Network are available Gartner’s SymLive at www.gartner.com/us/symposium.

Postal Cuts to Slow Delivery of First-class Mail – WHO CARES??

The Scan Man thinks that we will survive just fine with slower first-class delivery.  There are 3 steps to easing transition to slower mail:

1. Accept and use electronic payments.  Using online services are very inexpensive and easy to use.  Typically payments clear in 2 days, which is less than the time it takes to receive a first-class mailed check, and have that check clear.
2. Use a scanner to convert paper documents to digital and send them via email or eFAX.  A super-nice desktop scanner can be acquired for less than $400.
3. Check to see if a scanned document can be substituted for paper documents.  I see many organizations who use paper documents simply because they have always used paper documents.  Ask the question.  Many will find that a digital document is just as legal as the paper document, and in fact it is preferable to the paper document.

So long as you can get business documents and payments quickly, there are plenty of other options for packages.  It is rare that bulk mail, catalogs, and greeting cards must arrive faster than 2 days.

Which Kindle Should You Buy?

The Scan Man has tested a variety of tablets, and is still enamored with the iPad.  However, Amazon is throwing its considerable weight into the tablet ring with the $200 Kindle Fire.  From the pages of Gizomod, read on:

Holy crap, we’re covered in Kindles. As of today there are six different Kindles you can choose from at 11 different price-points. How ever will you decide? Here’s a quick look at all of ‘em, and our pre-release pick.

The Kindle (cheap)This is not the old Kindle, it’s the new Kindle. But it’s just called the Kindle. Don’t be confused. This is your base model, but it’s 30 percent lighter than the previous generation, and it’s 18 percent smaller even though the screen is the same 6-inch size. It’s only 79 bucks if you don’t mind having ads on your e-book reader. If you want to go ad-free it’ll run you $109. The biggest downside to this model is that there’s no keyboard anymore, so when you have to input text you have to deal with scrolling through a slow, awkward onscreen keyboard.The Kindle TouchThis is the first major departure for the Kindle line (though, not the majorest, ultimately). It does away with almost all of the buttons—none for turning pages, and no keys for entering text. Instead, you get an IR touchscreen. Good news, the touchscreen looked very responsive, and the onscreen keyboard seemed to work just fine. It’s $99 bucks with the aforementioned ads, or $139 to damn the man. The coolest part of this one is its X-Ray feature (check out some video of it here), which gives you a bunch of contextual information about the book you’re reading. It’s actually pretty genius.

The Kindle Touch 3GIt’s the Kindle Touch. But with 3G. This means you can download stuff without a Wi-Fi connection. It’ll cost you 50 bucks more for the privilege ($149 with ads, and $189 without). On the plus side, it is unlimited, contract-free, international 3G, but in my opinion, it’s probably not worth it. Maaaybe if you plan on using your Kindle for reading a lot of short things, but if you’re primarily downloading full books, those take a while to read, so you can probably just stock up when you have Wi-Fi.

The Kindle KeyboardThis is the old Kindle, but with a new name, and a lower price. They Kindle Keyboard has… a keyboard. It’s definitely handy if you plan on doing a lot of searching and typing, but if you’re going to be doing more reading than typing, you probably don’t need it. It’s $99 with “Special Offers” and $139 without. It’s bigger, heavier, and slower than the new basic Kindle, and it costs $20 more. Unless you’re going to do a ton of typing, don’t bother. There’s also a 3G version available for $139 with ads, or $189 without. The subsection of humanity that should buy this is minuscule.

The Kindle Fire

Well, hi there, new hotness. Obviously, this is the biggest departure for the traditional Kindle line. That’s because it’s not just an e-book reader, it’s a full-fledged tablet. There are pros and cons with that. On the pro side, you can do way more with it. Full web, email, Android apps (including some very nice games), video, the whole shibang. It’s still small and light, but it’s got a Gorilla Glass front, pretty good resolution, and a wide viewing angle. Oh, and it’s only $199. No ads, no caveats. It’s fast and very sweet-looking, and yes, of course you can read your e-books, too. On the con side, this isn’t e-ink anymore, and so that sensational battery life is gone. They say you’ll get seven to eight hours of screen-on time, which ain’t bad, but it doesn’t come close to e-ink (think weeks). It’s not as easy on the eyes, either (though you can read in the dark). It’s built on top of Android 2.3, but it’s basically unrecognizable. It doesn’t have Android Market, or a lot of other Google goodness, but it’s got a fast and (much more) intuitive interface. Easily the best $200 tablet we’ve ever seen.

Our Pick

Look, there are two categories here: there’s the five e-ink e-book readers, and there’s the one tablet. Of the e-ink, e-book readers our pick is… The $99 Kindle Touch. Wi-Fi only, with “Special Offers.” Here’s why. Entering text and selecting words is just much easier. It’s nice and clean looking. The X-Ray feature is awesome. It’s like a dictionary, encyclopedia, and Cliff’s Notes wrapped into a pre-loaded package (it downloads with the book, so you don’t need connectivity to see ‘em). And guess what, though we talked a lot about the ads, the “Special Offers” are essentially a screensaver and only display when you aren’t reading. They’re incredibly unobtrusive, and who knows, you might even find a local deal. At $99 it’s an awesome deal.

As far as the tablet goes, the Kindle Fire looks awesome. For $199 it’s the highest-end device for the least amount of money we’ve seen (it’s the same hardware as the $500 BlackBerry Playbook). You won’t get the full “Google Experience,” but this tablet isn’t for someone looking to replace a laptop. This device is for consuming media, and its interface is vastly more intuitive than Honeycomb’s. If you want a cheap but still very good tablet that isn’t an iPad, it’s looking like this is your baby. When HP’s TouchPad dropped to 100 bucks, it flew off the shelves, and it really didn’t even work that well. For just $200 you’re getting something that’s alive, good, and fast. If you’re wondering if you should be excited, the answer is yes, we think you should.

So now you have our preliminary, pre-review, recommendations. It just comes down to do you want an e-book reader or a tablet? But really, you could get both of them and it would still cost a whole lot less than an iPad. You can pre-order these now at Amazon, though the new ones won’t ship until November 15th. Which Kindle (if any) will you take?

Yes, Google Drive Is Coming. For Real This Time.

From Tech Crunch, Google looks to be jumping seriously into the document storage business with a GDRIVE.  Read on:

About a month ago, some additions to the code in Chromium (the open source browser behind Chrome) suggested that the long-fabled “GDrive” may be on the verge of actually launching. A week later, user-facing proof started appearing. Then earlier today, sharp-eyed social media consultant, Johannes Wigand, spotted something interesting during a presentation at a Google-sponsored event: something that sure looks a lot like Google Drive.

And it is.

Over the past month, we’ve been able to dig up more information about Google Drive. First of all, it is very real. And it is being used internally at Google. Of course, it was also real back in 2007 and 2008 before it was eventually killed. But talking to employees back then who saw and used the service all agreed that it was pretty wonky and not ready for prime time. This new version is expected to be much better.

As you can see in Wigand’s picture (above, with important elements circled by me), Google Drive on the web will essentially be Google Docs rebranded. This shouldn’t be a big surprise since Google has been positioning Docs as a sort of Google Drive since early 2010. The difference is that Google specifically didn’t want to call it that at the time. Now they do.

And it makes a lot more sense. Few people are using Google Docs for online storage beyond the files they use in Docs. Most still probably don’t even realize they can. Something as simple as changing the name to Google Drive should help with that. There will also be a new “My Google Drive” area for various folders in Google Drive. There will be other Drive-specific tools as well.

But here’s the real key: there will also be native syncing software that you install on your various computers and mobile devices. Yes, like Dropbox.

This was also true back in the day with GDrive, but again, the service (codenamed: Platypus) was said to be very buggy. Now it is said to work well. If you have a document on your computer that you want to move to another one, you simply drag and drop it into this new Google Drive sync app. Or, of course, you can use the web.

We haven’t heard the timetable for the Google Drive roll-out, but we imagine it will be fairly soon. Again, Google is using this internally right now and has been for some time. One thing that Google may be waiting for is Ice Cream Sandwich, the new version of Android due next month. There may be some built-in Google Drive component to it (though that’s just me speculating). And it seems that it will be at least a part of Chrome, and more importantly, Chrome OS.

Expect Google Drive to reside at drive.google.com (not live yet). It’s not clear how docs.google.com (the current home of Docs) will be used — perhaps as the home of the word processor app or maybe it will just redirect. Also not clear is how Google will allocate storage for this service, but presumably it will be the same as they currently do for Docs/Gmail/etc. You get a certain (ever-increasing) amount for free, and if you need more, you can buy it.